When a car manufacturer sells a car, in many parts of the world they're supposed to still offer parts for it for 7 years after they stop selling it, by law.
That's not exactly great, tbh. A car can easily run for 10y (mine is due for a replacement at 19yo), so 7y seems ecologically unnecessarily wasteful. I get that it doesn't make sense to offer parts for 20yo cars, but if we want to live in a sustainable future, people need to stop replacing cars after 5y or so.
Not 7 years after you bought it. It is 7 years after they stop selling it. If you bought the last one, sure. But if you bought it say 2 years after release you may end up in the tens of years of usage. Also don't forget cars need maintenance. You can compare with buying iPhone on release day versus the day before it is discontinued.
7 years is a relatively long time for a product, but not necessarily for a car. The average car age at scrap time is 13.9 years (UK stats). [Wildly off topic ranting about the
balance of embodied versus emitted CO2 for the typical ICE vehicle omitted. Clue: 10 years is about the break-even point.]
> Wildly off topic ranting about the balance of embodied versus emitted CO2 for the typical ICE vehicle omitted. Clue: 10 years is about the break-even point
Do you mean it takes about 10 years for the car to emit the same amount of co2 that was used in producing it?
If so, that's not "breakeven". Breakeven is when future emissions savings from a newer better car make it worth scrapping (not just selling) a car and replacing it with a newly manufactured one.
It’s generally not necessary to replace cars every 5 years due to part shortage.
For years the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) replacement parts fill into the wholesale and retail channels. If the manufacturer stops offering the part, there are still parts in those channels to meet demand, sometimes for many more years to come.
The manufacturer may keep offering parts beyond the requirement, too. Parts can be profitable, and service can be a big part of dealer revenue. Dealers who make money on service put pressure on the manufacturer to keep parts available.
Physical parts are also pretty easy to copy, so if demand persists beyond the availability of OEM parts, you can often get aftermarket parts. There is also a channel of junkyards and enthusiasts who hoard used parts with life still left in them.
I’ve got a couple friends who like old vehicles and they are able to get parts for trucks that are nearing 40 years old. I own a car that just turned 12 and have never had the slightest problem getting parts for it, even OEM.
> I get that it doesn't make sense to offer parts for 20yo cars
Why not? Personally i believe a hardware manufacturer should be bound by law to sell parts for any vehicle it sold in the past, as long as it exists. Yes even if it was produced 40 years ago. There's no reason for it to be otherwise.
If this was mandated by law all the tiny incompatibilities that they introduce with very varied models will suddenly go away because they'll be careful to make products that can actually be maintained and repaired decades from now with spare parts compatible with different models.
Some people use cars who are more than 50 years old and they're just fine. Same goes for washing machines, drills, bikes... We have to stop this capitalist nonsense that keeps on producing single-use items that end up in the trash in the coming months. IT'S INSANE!
“a hardware manufacturer should be bound by law to sell parts for any vehicle it sold in the past, as long as it exists”
Cars would get extremely expensive. Imagine Ford still having to supply model T wheels and engines.
They either would have to have kept a production line and employees knowing to operate it around, or have stocked ‘enough’ parts, where ‘enough’ is very hard to estimate up front. Also, stocked parts deteriorate, so for, for example, tyres, they would have to keep a production line running.
And that’s the easy case. At least Ford can ballpark know how many model T’s still exist. what if a car of a model that we thought didn’t exist anymore gets discovered in a barn?
And of course, that wouldn’t work in cases where manufacturers get bankrupt.
> or have stocked ‘enough’ parts, where ‘enough’ is very hard to estimate up front.
On the building where I live, the company which does the elevator maintenance offered a significant discount on the replacement of the control system in the machine room with a more modern model (which uses less energy). Their reason: including us, they had only two clients left which used that older system, so once both upgraded to a newer (and more common) model, they would no longer need to stock replacement parts for that older model.
It's extra silly since there's always a robust aftermarket for any reasonably popular car. You can buy new Model T parts in 2021. A lot of modern cars are built on shared platforms, too, so the odds of someone still making parts go up since the engine is probably the same as 20 other models.
>It's extra silly since there's always a robust aftermarket for any reasonably popular car.
One difference is the difficulties in making some 'parts' now. It's one thing to make a fuel pump for a 1950's car, quite another to duplicate a controller board, often with obsolete parts and secret software, that runs the convertible top.
Another is that a lot of parts are more monolithic than they used to be and harder to design/build. Look at headlight assemblies.
It doesn't help that with the increasing amount of software and electronics in a modern car (a Tesla being the leading example), the auto industry is acquiring the product lifecycle times and forced obsolescence of the PC industry.
But consumer electronics are written off on much shorter timeframes than cars. Are we going to require support for electronics for 7 years? I would be in favor of it, but I don't see it happen. Device was EoL in 2015, the vuln is from 2019, breach 2021. Even if we take the vuln date, that's 4 years after EoL. The question then becomes: is it reasonable to say that electronics are expected to have a life half of that of cars? I could argue both ways on this.
But it's EOL. EOL means end of life, not just "no longer sold". EOL means we agreed it's trash and you are using it at your own risk.
It's not the manufacturer's fault if your expired fire extinguisher or medicine fails.
Internet things are out durable goods. They require maintenance or they fail.
If EOL is unreasonably short, that's a factor in purchase decision or contract or commercial code violation if they surprised you with accelerated EOL.
That works if they said the EoL date explicitly at checkout. I think they should also have to say the per annum cost, so "£120, equivalent to £240 per annum to our EoL date" (ie if the EoL is in 6 months).
That's an interesting case. BMW knew about that back in 2012 but covered it up for 5+ years before finally agreeing to a recall. They perhaps are covering their butts against lawsuits due to thirty negligence. And they wouldn't want a new fire triggering extra attention to an old fire, and also they want to burnish (ha!) their brand image, unlike WD who has practically no competition.
> But consumer electronics are written off on much shorter timeframes than cars.
They are, but it kills the planet.
We have 12 year old PCs in the family. Well, back then they were high-end models bought for work. Now they are running Linux just fine for general family purpose. They use a bit more of energy than a new model, but where we live you have to heat buildings at least 8 months a year anyway. I am sure producing a new one would have required much more resources.
It's also important to point out that despite using more energy because it's older hardware, it'll use considerably less energy during its all life, than it takes to produce a new computer.
Replacing old hardware with "more energy-efficient" hardware is a trap from green capitalism and the numbers do not add up usually.
I find this claim a little hard to believe. Data centers routinely replace ~3 year old computers because the number of old computers they would need to keep running and cooling exceeds the cost of new more efficient hardware. The price of new hardware includes all the energy costs of producing it. Obviously the environmental externalities of energy aren't fully priced in, but that is also the case for data center energy.
What might be a more useful comparison is a $20 5W raspberry pi vs. a 2009 100W (at best) desktop computer where a month of continuous desktop operation costs more in energy than the new raspberry pi and ~1 year of usage.
In my opinion the difference should be whether something is the first generation of a product or an iteration. Basically somehow using the Lindy effect to determine how long it should be supported.
E.g. if I had bought the very first generation of the iPhone it would have been much more out of couriosity, not long time usage expectation. But I think there now has been enough development on it, that I should be able to expect the iPhone I bought in 2020 to last say to 2030 somehow if I want to stick with it.
OK, well now come up with a formula that says (from a series of objective and not-readily-gameable characteristics) for a random electrical/electronic device (or, if you want to separate the two, provide a way to do so - is a 1980's microwave with an 8-bit controller for the timer 'electronics' or 'electrical'?) how long the warranty should be, how long it should be 'supported' (for a definition of 'supported') and how long critical errors should be fixed. Also specify which issues, and at which time point, should be paid for or not.
There is a lot of 'everything should be supported for eternity for free' in this thread, but I see no (at least somewhat) concrete suggestions for better solutions. If it was easy, we would have done it people.
"If it was easy, we would have done it" is just not true.
Companies have little to no incentive and consumers have little to no power. Barring some very unlikely industry-wide agreement, it requires legislation.
(Note I'm not replying to your first paragraph at all, only the last)
Here's a concrete solution -- The US Consumer Product Safety Commission should be given regulatory power over all consumer products, such as to enforce a minimum five (5) year support for repairs and parts availability, and standardized safety + recall notices.
NHTSA already does all of this for cars and vehicles. (They require a minimum 10 year parts availability. They handle recalls via VIN for auto manufacturers, including notices and matching effected model lookups, etc) - https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle
US-CPSC should run a matching mirror'd program exactly like it, but for consumer goods sold in the US.
> There is a lot of 'everything should be supported for eternity for free' in this thread, but I see no (at least somewhat) concrete suggestions for better solutions. If it was easy, we would have done it people.
That's the easy, concrete solution. It's just not "profitable" from a capitalist perspective, and that's why no manufacturer is doing it.
Well not exactly nobody. Some manufacturers like FACOM (probably others) that are not into electronics have (or used to have) lifetime warranties and will happily repair or replace a product that is decades old.
The question is: as a society, do we want to pursue everyone's good and make things more efficient and ecological? or do we want more profits for the industry owners and more inequality and damage to the environment?
These two paths are fundamentally opposed. There is no conciliating them. If you want "nature" and "consumer rights", then you need to abolish "capitalism".
Moreover, I think WD defense here will be that while you could, you did not have to plug your WD device to internet, in order for it to serve its purpose. They will try to argue that the majority of their offer is hard discs, and if your drive has extra ability to connect to internet, that's extra feature.
Yes, but that "extra feature" is most probably the main reason that model was bought instead of a cheaper model without a network connection. That is, that "extra ability" would be in fact the main differentiator of that model.
